Photo: Anjanette Stayten, FEMA photo
Dear boys and girls,
Take a minute sometime to look around the sanctuary at your church. Do you see some things that are important to you? To your family? To your pastor? Sure you do — the font where you watched your little brother get baptized; the pulpit Bible and the wonderful stories in it; the Sunday School room and all the colorful signs and banners on the walls; the organ that keeps the children’s choir on pitch — and hurries it along!
Why are these things important to us? The church and the things in it matter to us and our church family because they help us to learn about our faith. Like our homes, they give us a safe place to grow up in, a place to bring our friends to share God’s love.
Now, just for a minute, close your eyes and pretend with me. Imagine you are asleep in your bed one night, safe and warm, and there is a humongous thunderstorm! The rain falls hard against your windows, and the bright flashes of lightning and the loud CRASH of the thunder wake you up and scare you. Maybe you run to your parents’ bedroom. Maybe your cat or puppy jumps on your bed and hides under the covers. Finally, the storm passes over. And just as you are falling back to sleep, you hear sirens across town, and you know it comes from fire trucks, and you say a quick prayer that no one was hurt.
Then, the next morning, when you wake up to go to school, your mom tells you sadly that the sirens you heard were those of trucks on their way to your church, because lightning struck the steeple and the church burned to the ground. When you drive by, you see the roof all caved in, the steeple gone, all the stained-glass windows popped out or melted. You smell a horrible stink of burned wood and papers and wet, soggy carpet.
Can you imagine how strange it would be if this church weren’t here anymore? If the Sunday School class had to meet at the Lutheran church down the street, and the choir at the Catholic church, and worship services were held in your elementary school?
Do you know what? This isn’t a made-up story at all. It actually has happened to some Presbyterian churches, and not so long ago. Those churches needed a long time and a lot of help, and a lot of people and money and prayers, to start over. Where do you suppose that help came from?
Guess what? It came from YOU and everyone else in your church! Every Easter, when your church fills up those fish banks, and you and your parents and friends give money to the One Great Hour of Sharing offering, some of it goes to help Presbyterian Disaster Assistance help congregations that have lost their church homes to fire.
With that money, Presbyterians send “response teams” of people to listen to and pray with those who have lost their churches, to help them make plans to rebuild and to offer advice about how to get through the confusing time when church groups have to be moved around to different places until their own building is fixed or rebuilt.
Every time you put a coin in one of those fish banks, you’re helping other children in some Presbyterian church that had a disaster like a fire — letting them know that they’re not alone, that God is loving and caring for them through other people … us!
God bless you,
Miss Laurie
The Rev. Laurie Kraus is a member of the National Response Team of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance.
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